Menticulture Blog

Serendipity

There are often serendipities (though I'm talking about reading theoretical works here, so when I write 'serendipity' you may read 'pain in the arse') in the way I discover new avenues of critical thought to pursue, though now I think about it, the serendipity probably resides in my limited ability to discern and decipher connections rather than the rarity, inscrutability - or even coincidence - of the connections themselves. Perhaps I'm like a half-wit, or at least the opposite of a Quasimodo, who given any chance sees the rightness and absolute simplicity of analogies and apposite moments as though they were the salty truth of the world. I, on the contrary, make hard work where there might be restful ease.

In any case, I was reading Lave and Wenger on the subject on legitimate peripheral participation [1] (their precursor to the inexaggerably important idea of communities of practice) when I was drawn to their description of Bourdieu's ideas of 'conductorless orchestras' (what other metaphor for benign anarchy could you hope for?) and thus led to Michael Grenfell's edited work, Bourdieu and Education, in which I was teased by the characterisation of Bourdieu's work as an attempt to resolve the dichotomy of objective knowledge ('knowledge without a knowing subject') and hermeneutics (subjective and individual understanding).

His intent is to find a theory which is robust enough to be objective and generalizable, and yet accounts for individual, subjective thought and action. [2]

This for me is another case of serendipitously discovering more justification for resolving such dichotomies (e.g. the subject / object dichotomy) by encapsulating the whole dyad under the reunified sign of 'practice', as Mike and I discussed (if you can be arsed to read pages and pages of burbling) at the CEMP blog.

In any case, if you cannot see the woods for the trees, try banging your head on those trees until they tire of your bloody-minded importuning and give you a map of the locality.